Friday, January 22, 2016

TenFourFox 38.6.0 is available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). I'm sorry it's been so quiet around here; I'm in the middle of a backbreaking Master's course, my last one before I'm finally done with the lousy thing, and I haven't had any time to start on 45 so far. 38.6 does have some other fixes in it, though: I think I found the last place where bookmark backups were being mistakenly saved in LZ4 based on Chris Trusch's report, and the problematic fonts on the iCloud login page are now blacklisted, so you should be able to login again. I can't do much more testing than that, however, since I don't use iCloud personally, so other lapses in font functionality will require the font URL and I'll add them to the blacklist in 38.7. The browser will go live Monday Pacific time as usual. (The temporary workaround is to set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false, and switch the setting back when you don't need it anymore.)

Speaking of, downloadable fonts were exactly the same problem on the Sun Ultra-3 laptop I've been refurbishing; Oracle still provides a free Solaris 10 build of 38ESR, but it crashes on web fonts for reasons I have yet to diagnose, so I just have them turned off. Yes, it really is a SPARC laptop, a rebranded Tadpole Viper, and I think the fastest one ever made in this form factor (a 1.2GHz UltraSPARC IIIi). It's pretty much what I expected the PowerBook G5 would have been -- hot, overthrottled and power-hungry -- but Tadpole actually built the thing and it's not a disaster, relatively speaking. There's no JIT in this Firefox build, the brand new battery gets only 70 minutes of runtime even with the CPU clock-skewed to hell, it stands a very good chance of rendering me sterile and/or medium rare if I actually use it in my lap and it had at least one sudden overtemp shutdown and pooped all over the filesystem, but between Firefox, Star Office and pkgsrc I can actually use it. More on that for laughs in a future post.

It has been pointed out to me that Leopard Webkit has not made an update in over three months, so hopefully Tobias is still doing okay with his port.